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“E” is for Evans, Matilda Arabella (1872-1935)

“E” is for Evans, Matilda Arabella (1872-1935). Physician. A native of Aiken, Evans attended Schofield Normal and Industrial School. After teaching for four years at Schofield, she became the only Black student at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She graduated in 1897 and moved to Columbia where she became the city’s first female physician. Because southern Blacks suffered high mortality rates due to insufficient health care and neglect, Evans decided that hospitals were the greatest need. She established the Taylor Lane Hospital and Training School for Nurses, Columbia’s first Black Hospital. During the Depression she concentrated on providing maternity and infant health care after federal funds for those services ceased. In 1932 she opened the Evans Clinic. Matilda Arabella Evans’s walk-in clinics and hospitals were the first available for many Deep South Blacks.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.